GETTING AROUND.

Kennedy work a sour note for night drivers

July 30, 2001|By Jon Hilkevitch.

Drivers who crave having Chicago-area highways almost all to themselves very late at night--and who still hold a grudge over the handling of traffic during the 1998 night-time resurfacing of the Eisenhower Expressway--are guaranteed to despise the brake-tapping expected to start this week on the Kennedy Expressway around downtown.

Extensive work on the Kennedy (Interstate Highway 90/94) begins Wednesday, requiring the closing of multiple lanes and ramps from north of Hubbard's Cave to the Eisenhower (Interstate Highway 290) from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily through Oct. 31.

Getting Around expects the first night of the state road project will be a test of drivers' pain thresholds--and one that could have been avoided by coordination between the City of Chicago and the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Extremely large crowds of excited and preoccupied people will travel, most by car, Wednesday night to the Radiohead concert at Hutchison Field on the south end of Grant Park. And when the last chord dies off and the partying is over, they will dance back to the Soldier Field parking lot, to the East Monroe underground parking garage, the Millennium Park parking garage or the Chicago auto pound.

The road construction work will be in full swing by the time many of the Radiohead fans reach the Kennedy Non-Expressway, where the fusion of lane closings, confusion and impatience will mix in the air with the dust and gravel kicked up by freshly milled asphalt.

Any concert-goers who are now thinking about ripping up their Radiohead tickets can instead send them to Getting Around's home address.

I-80 work in Will County

Road resurfacing is scheduled to begin Monday on an 8 1/2-mile section of Interstate Highway 80 from the Will-Grundy County line to Rowell Avenue in Joliet. Work will also be done on many of the entrance and exit ramps, starting with a four-week closure of the Richards Street entrance ramp to westbound I-80. In place of Richards, motorists can use the entrance ramp at Illinois Highway 53.

I-80 will be reduced to one lane in each direction until the project is completed in October, according to IDOT.

A poll on bus stop poles

Getting Around is curious what CTA riders think about the new experimental bus stop signs in the Loop.

The CTA is testing a different design at each of four bus stops: Michigan and Chicago Avenues, Michigan and Washington Street, Adams and LaSalle Streets, and Clark and Lake Streets. All the signs sport a circular CTA sign at the top of the bus stop pole.

The effort is aimed at satisfying Mayor Richard Daley's preference for simplified and clean-looking signage while meeting the paramount requirement that the CTA provide its riders with more detailed and up-to-date information about routes and schedules.

Some of the signs highlight the bus route number only, while others display the bus route name and route number together. The experimental signs also have blue backgrounds to denote local routes and red backgrounds to denote express routes.

To any transit traditionalist who already suspects that the CTA's latest bus stop sign experiment represents a slippery slope leading to the re-emergence of the agency's ill-fated idea a couple of years ago to renumber the entire CTA bus route system, fear not.

The CTA borrowed the bus sign design from its idol, the New York City Transit Authority.

The new signs will be up through September to test their durability and gauge rider reaction. The CTA said customer surveys will be conducted before the agency decides which signs are the most functional for installation at 12,000 bus stops.

Map mania misplaced

To all the Getting Around readers who are sending requests for free Illinois road maps to the address listed every week at the bottom of this column: You took a wrong turn.

In an earlier column, Getting Around said that the 2001-02 highway maps of Illinois are available, free of charge, by mailing a request to the Illinois Department of Transportation, 2300 S. Dirksen Pkwy., Springfield, IL 62764. Attention: map sales.

Requests are limited to two maps. Tell IDOT if you want the standard highway map or the larger-print edition.

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Contact Getting Around about anything having to do with transportation except map requests at jhilkevitch@tribune.com or c/o the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.